necessity; but hardly
anybody believed in it or wanted it, and the nation accepted it as a
sort of locum tenens, rather than willed or ordained it. Its overthrow
by the coup d'etat may not be legally defensible, but the election of
Napoleon III. condoned the illegality, if there was any, and gave the
emperor a legal title, that no republican, that none but a despot or a
no-government man can dispute. As the will of the nation, in so far as
it contravenes not the law of God or the law of nature, binds every
individual of the nation, no individual or number of individuals has,
or can have, any right to conspire against him, or to labor to oust him
from his place, till his escheat has been pronounced by the voice of
the nation. The state, in its sovereign capacity, willing it, is the
only power competent to revoke or to change the form and constitution
of the imperial government. The same must be said of every nation that
has a lawful government; and this, while it preserves the national
sovereignty, secures freedom of progress, condemns all sedition,
conspiracy, rebellion, revolution, as does the Christian law itself.

CHAPTER IX.

THE UNITED STATES

Sovereignty, under God, inheres in the organic people, or the people as
the republic; and every organic people fixed to the soil, and
politically independent of every other people, is a sovereign people,
and, in the modern sense, an independent sovereign nation.

Sovereign states may unite in an alliance, league, or confederation,
and mutually agree to exercise their sovereign powers or a portion of
them in common, through a common organ or agency; but in this agreement
they part with none of their sovereignty, and each remains a sovereign
state or nation as before. The common organ or agency created by the
convention is no state, is no nation, has no inherent sovereignty, and
derives all its vitality and force from the persisting sovereignty of
the states severally that have united in creating it. The agreement no
more affects the sovereignty of the several states entering into it,
than does the appointment of an agent affect the rights and powers of
the principal. The creature takes nothing from the Creator, exhausts
not, lessens not his creative energy, and it is only by his retaining
and continuously exerting his creative power that the creature
continues to exist.

An independent state or nation may, with or without its consent, lose
its sovereignty,